Nearby Theaters

Built and opened as the Opera House on December 5, 1892. In December 1925 it was renamed State Theatre, but this didn’t last long, as in September 1926 it was renamed Winona Theatre and opened as a movie theatre. It was operated by Minnesota Amusement Co. (Publix) from the early-1930’s, and was remodelled in the late-1930’s and again in 1950 to the plans of architectural firm Liebenberg & Kaplan. It closed in the 1970’s. It later became a restaurant and bar called Emils. It was demolished in 1990.

Either many additional pictures have been added to the Winona gallery to which I linked in my comment of December 23, 2009, or the pictures have been rearranged. The 1908 photo showing the Winona Opera House in no longer 6th from the top of the page, but 21st from the top.

It’s possible that this house was never called the Colonial Theatre. Winona, by Walter Bennick, has a photo (bottom of page 113 of the Google Books preview) showing the opening of the Colonial Theatre on August 29, 1912. The Colonial Amusement Company leased the Winona Opera House in 1915, according to an item in the November 6 issue of The Moving Picture World, which said that the company was operating the house as a movie theater.

I’ve been unable to establish a timeline for the Colonial Theatre, but it appears to have still been operating in the mid-1930s when the Winona Theatre had already become a Paramount-Publix house.

The finding aid to the Liebenberg & Kaplan papers indicates that the firm worked on the Winona Theatre during the years 1936-1940 and again in 1950. One of those projects was probably the one in which the original Romanesque Revival facade was covered by one in the Streamline Modern style.

As I stated before, the Opera House did show movies as early as 1915 (I found an ad for “Birth Of A Nation”). After it became the Winona Theater, they did continue to stage plays in addition to showing movies. I attended some plays there as late as the 1970s.